Rails 3.2 + Ruby 1.9.3, created_at returns with wrong timezone

Question

I upgraded to Rails 3.2 and Ruby 1.9.3 and I get a very strange behavior

I have a Model called Entry. when a new Entry is created it get inserted into the DB with the current date and time.

But when I run Entry.find_by_id(THE_ENTRY_ID).created_at I get the "correct" created at datetime but In a different TimeZone for example: in the db:

2013-03-24 00:05:29

while in the Rails console and in the application:

Sat, 23 Mar 2013 20:05:29 EDT -04:00

Why is it suddenly returning the wrong time zone?

Answer 1

OK after reading the DOCS and seeing this rails casts: http://railscasts.com/episodes/106-time-zones-revised

everything is now clear.

config.time_zone = 'Eastern Time (US & Canada)'

this setting is the actual setting that's in charged of converting all time objects to this current time zone. that is way i saw it as -4

this setting:

config.active_record.default_timezone

is the one that decides on how to save the time in the DB, but... it only gets 2 possible values: :local and :UTC and the default is :UTC

when i used the rails console to see my entry the time presented is after the conversion to 'Eastern Time' , in order to see the actual date stored in the DB use:

created_at_before_type_cast

which returned the UTC time as it is the default

and the reason i thought that in the DB its stored in my time zone +2 is because i used MySQL Workbench and its GUI just showed me the datetime values in my local machine time.

summary:

the setting that actually matters:

config.time_zone

it works just fine. going through the DOCS is important

Answer 2

Check the configuration in the application.rb . If no timezone is set, rails will take the default timezone of your operating system. To fix that, set UTC as the timezone.